Friday, November 21

Harper's Weekly Review

Now that I live a life of no Sunday Brunches or Free Beer Wednesdays, it's probably my favorite thing that happens exactly once a week. I'm just gonna post it all:

Doctors in Berlin announced that they had cured a man of AIDS by giving him transplanted blood stem cells from a donor naturally resistant to the virus; other researchers cautioned that the treatment was of little immediate use, and justified in this case only because the patient had leukemia. “Frankly,” said Dr. Robert C. Gallo of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, “I'd rather take the medicine.”1 A German shoplifter with no arms stole a 24-inch television. “It's hard to believe,” said a police officer, “that the sight of an armless man walking along with a giant TV clamped to his body did not get anyone's attention.”2 A man in a motorized wheelchair robbed a Space Coast Credit Union branch in Merritt Island, Florida, telling employees that he was rigged with explosives; police caught him ten minutes later and recovered the stolen money from his prosthetic leg.3 Huseyin Kalkan, the mayor of Batman, Turkey, said that the town would sue Warner Bros. for a portion of the royalties from the movie The Dark Knight .“ ”There is,“ said Kalkan, ”only one Batman."4 A sixth severed foot washed ashore in Canada,5 and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who is expected to sign a $7 million book deal, was asked if she planned to run for president in 2012. “I'm like, okay, God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I'm like, Don't let me miss the open door,” she said. “I'll plow through that door.”6 The Secret Service assigned official code names to President-elect Barack Obama (“Renegade”), First Lady Michelle Obama (“Renaissance”), and their daughters Malia (“Radiance”) and Sasha (“Rosebud”).78 In Chicago, a relaxed-looking Obama, who gained 700,000 Facebook friends since his election, met with Senator John McCain, who has lost 1,000 Facebook friends,910 and astronomers in Canada and the United States, observing the constellations Piscis Austrinus and Pegasus, captured the first images of distant, dusty planets orbiting young, bright stars.11

The price of oil fell below $60 per barrel, a 20-month low,12 and it was announced that a portion of the government's $700 billion bailout package may be used to pay year-end bonuses on Wall Street.13 Computer giant Sun Microsystems shed 6,000 jobs,14 and sales rose for Hormel Foods Corporation, which produces SPAM. “We are scheduled to work every day except Thanksgiving and Christmas,” said Darwin Sellers, a SPAM “formulator” who adds salt, sugar, and nitrates to rectangles of pork at a plant in Minnesota. “The man upstairs [would like] to get us to work eight days a week.”15 Barack Obama's chief-of-staff, Rahm Emanuel, apologized to the Arab community for remarks made by his father, Benjamin Emanuel, who told an Israeli newspaper that his son would “obviously influence the president to be pro-Israel. Why wouldn't he? What is he, an Arab? He's not going to be mopping floors at the White House.” 16 Assailants sprayed acid in the faces of 15 schoolgirls in Kandahar, Afghanistan,. 17 and an Indian high court dismissed arguments that homosexual intercourse should be banned for causing bodily injuries.18 India's space program landed a probe painted with the national flag on the surface of the moon.19

Nigerian police discovered a massive baby farm in the city of Enugu,20 and a grandmother in Ohio gave birth to her daughter's triplets.21 Officials in Nebraska were scrambling to change a “safe haven” law, whereby children can be legally abandoned at hospitals, because it failed to specify an age limit for the children. “Please don't bring your teenager to Nebraska,” said Governor Dave Heineman, responding to a spate of abandoned out-of-state teens. 22 Don Dollar, a City Hall employee in Vernon, Mississippi, said that anyone who was happy with Obama's victory should seek religious forgiveness. “This is a community that's supposed to be filled with a bunch of Christian folks. If they're not disappointed, they need to be at the altar.”23 Holocaust survivors demanded that the Mormon church stop posthumously baptizing Jews killed in concentration camps,24 and judges in Pleasant Grove City, Utah, were weighing a free-speech suit filed by adherents to the Summum church. Members of the church claim that the city is discriminating against them by displaying a red granite plaque of the Ten Commandments in a public park but refusing to display a monument inscribed with their own faith's Seven Aphorisms, which were communicated via telepathy from divine beings to a man named Corky Ra. Ron Temu and Su Menu, two Summum worshippers, argued that the Commandments were compatible with the Aphorisms, as both were handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai. “If you look at them side by side,” said Su Menu of the two monuments while sitting in a metal pyramid and drinking an alcoholic sacramental nectar beside a mummified Doberman pinscher, “they really are saying similar things.”25